For one thing, Kenya's population has increased 10 times since the 1930's, thanks to the outsider's agricultural and transportation advances. Even the crop in question -- maize -- was brought by the Europeans from the Americas. So I'm not so sure that Africa was doing so great, by today's standards, before the outsiders came. The argument that "if we let things get bad enough, the leaders will be forced to do something" is proven incorrect by a look at history. Exactly how bad do things have to get?
The whole planet is on an unsustainable course, and we'll all end up living in a way that takes less out of it. But by sharing information we can have less waste on the one hand, and less hunger on the other.
Look at the alternative: admit that Saint Ronald Regan made a horrible mistake. Can you imagine the devastation that would cause to the religion of about 40% of America? Any amount spent on SDI is worth it to keep from admitting such a thing.
I have never seen the difference between "throwing money" and private sector that creates a lot of jobs that do nothing for society: advertising, luxury goods, half of the defense budget, most consumer goods, oversized housing, fashion, trips to Cancun where the the infrastructure is designed to keep the tourist from seeing actual Mexico. It's waste either way, burning fuel with no forward motion. It's resources wasted, poof gone forever, just to keep stirring a nation full of scrambled psychologies that can't settle down long enough to know what love is. (Maybe we should throw money at hysteria management?) Individuals throwing money at things that are wasteful or bad for them isn't freedom, it's addiction. There is a huge call for government policies to enable the addiction to continue. Good luck when sickness meets sickness.
It was email, Linux, and newsgroups that hooked me on the Internet in 1994. I don't think email alone would have done it. Screw "online news, banking services, restaurant reviews, shopping" -- those aren't killer apps to me. I need a forum for interacting with interesting people. The rest I can get to easily enough in town.
From what I've seen, manager boot camp takes 0 days, and you can declare success no matter what happens. Kind of like politics. Oh, wait, exactly like politics.
Leonard's been publishing for almost 60 years and both his old stuff and his latest stuff is wonderful. _Djibouti_ (2010) is about Somali pirates (and Americans) and shows detailed research. _Pagan Babies_ (2000) is set in Rwanda and Detroit. _Escape from Five Shadows_(1956) is a pulp western, where Leonard got started.
This has been studied. Spending a dollar on war and space research produces the same benefits for civilian life as spending $0.20 for civilian research. And this is just for the research. Funding for actually building and using the death machines invented by the research, and cleaning up afterward to the extent possible (nice prosthesis, soldier!), is pure waste. Space research at least has a huge advantage over war research of not creating such a mess when it's used for its intended purpose, but we'd be a lot better off just funding civilian research instead of the other two.
Amazing ballsy shift from the produce-at-all-cost mentality that typified China during it's early industrial growth. My hat's off to whoever had the vision to make this happen.
It's not just so show that they're part of a group, it's to show that the group means so much to them that they're willing to wear a flag of that identity on their skin for the rest of their life.
"Once a Marine always a Marine" is what the lifetime guys say, and they're the ones getting the tattoos, but the ones who aren't so sure about that aren't gonna get a tat.
We're all Slashdotters here, but only 27 of us value our membership in this group enough to have/. tattooed onto our bodies.
If nothing else, I would expect the/. crowd to be at least a little skeptical of *anything* that causes vast sums of money to change hands.
Exactly. Do you realize how much money changes hands because of materialistic belief systems, ego-stroking purchases, and energy-intensive lifestyles, all backed by the inverted philosophy that selfishness is good and that cooperation is evil? I fully support your scepticism regarding the wisdom of such things.
I installed Linux in April 1994, when the current Slackware kernel was 0.99pl14. A friend, Hal, had been encouraging me to use it for months since he knew I liked UNIX and hated Windows. I had a deal to deliver a C++ course and I needed tools to write it, so Hal gave me Slackware on a dozen or so floppies. I installed it on a 386 with 8 megs of RAM. I learned LaTeX and wrote a 200+ page course, viewing the LaTeX output with xdvi and compiling the lab exercises with g++. It worked wonderfully, no problems and no crashes. I remember that emacs took a long time to load, about a minute and 15 seconds, because it did floating point ops for font scaling and the 386 didn't have a FPU. So I would load emacs when I brought up the window manager (OpenLook I think) and then just let it sit there until I needed it. I think that Metafont (part of a LaTeX installation) use FP ops extensively too.
At the time a friend was authoring a C++ textbook on a 486 with 16 megs of RAM, using MS Word on Windows. He had constant crashes and problems because, among other things, it was too much for the machines of the day. But LaTeX easily handled my book, because of it's tight coding and it's data streams in, data streams out model. WYSIWYG word processors just weren't a good idea for large documents at the time. I would then print LaTeX's dvi output files on an HP LaserJet IIP for reproduction at a copy shop. I taught the course for the first time in August 1994 and several times after that. LaTex was a bigger learning curve than Linux by a factor of 5. I've been a Linux user and advocate ever since. I no longer use LaTeX but no one's holding my data hostage -- I can still install LaTeX and make changes to the course 15 years later. The only difference is that on today's machines it runs a lot faster!
including yours. Or maybe they're answering basic questions about the workings of fish which, like all basic research, may or may not pay off in the future. But you can bet that the scientists don't care any more than you do about the human significance of the tunes involved, despite the implications of your trollish post.
The other implication of posts like this is that the scientists are wasting money. Oh. I look at how, say, the DoD uses our money, and how the private sector (including, I daresay, *you*, my dear and cynical OP'er) spends it's money, and realize that money funding research would be madly wasted by the government or its citizens. So I say give it to the scientists. At least they're learning something, and sharing what they discover.
x86 code runs natively on 90% of the processors out there.
No it doesn't. Don't forget iPhones, Android phones, and many other mobile devices that aren't x86 compatible. To Java's advantage, it's becoming increasingly important that websites work well on mobile devices and future devices and processors yet to be envisioned. Trust me, suppliers to the mobile market would rather use Java than start developing an x86 emulator. As for what application vendors would prefer, I suppose it depends on their legacy codebase. Many companies understood in 1995 why they wanted a portable codebase, and started developing in Java despite it's slow performance at the time, but others didn't see the point and so Google's work is an attempt to bring the Java runtime's advantages to non-Java code.
The load time is the time it takes to download the complete application, dearchive the components, load the components into an interpreter or JIT, initialize the environment and/or APIs used, and finally present the application to the user.
Over any network, the first part of this -- downloading -- is 99% of the time used. Fortunately the enormous library of standard Java classes is already on the user's machine and doesn't have to be downloaded.
There are ways a developer could work around it using dynamic class loading, but this requires a great deal of knowledge, effort, and skill on the part of the developer.
Actually this is trivially easy, at the expense of many connections being established and disconnected. All the programmer has to do is leave the archive argument off of the applet tag, so that the classes are downloaded individually as needed, rather than as part of a jar file.
Maybe what you're getting at is, it would be nice if the programmer could clump classes that are used together into a jar, and have several different jars on the server, and have the applet's JVM load some kind of "table of contents" so that it knew which jar to request when a class was used that wasn't on the local machine yet. Dunno how, or if, Flash solves this problem.
The average line of code in industry is of much lower quality than the average line of code in FC9. Some of the GNU utilities and libraries have been polished up for 20 years, the kernel for 15, X for 20 years, etc. Code that is on its first release is often in production use in industry, but seldom used in any of the big distros -- that's the *other* 100 million lines of code sitting out there in the free software world. So I guess that $10.8B is low by a factor of two or three compared to the money it would cost to develop such a polished product if Microsoft, IBM, Sun, or Oracle were to attempt it.
I'm not sure that extraordinary claims actually *do* require extraordinary proof, just someone willing to make the claim. But in the Vista case, those making the claims apparently do have the proof. It's just that the proof isn't reported in the article about the claim, which is business as usual in the press, which reports the sensational bits and leaves the rest for us to find out on our own.
IBM created a framework to encourage kids to learn programming, but apparently it's so engaging that big kids who really ought to be working spend their time obsessed with it too. You create a bot class, overriding it's methods that respond to events in the game, and then have your bot compete in battle with other bots. As a side effect you learn fundamentals of Java.
I can't believe a person would spend his life on a pursuit like this. He must not care one bit about humanity's problems. "Your actions are screaming so loud I can't hear a word you say."
Too bad. He seems like a bright guy who could have contributed something.
..."it is a specialized subject that requires serious study and requires that those in the front line of defense be as knowledge as possible.
In a later chapter, Nance gives the Iraq war as an example of a group of leaders that were not as knowledge as possible and ignored the advice of those that were as knowledge[able] as possible."
In the McCarthy-led Red-hunting frenzy of the 1950's, the State Department purged itself of all people who knew what was going on in southeast Asia. Being knowledgeable, the experts said things like "the Vietnamese have a long unfriendly history with China and won't turn into a puppet state, but most of their citizens are being sorely treated by the current regime, and so Communism is very appealing to them." People that made remarks were seen to have Communist sympathies and driven out of government. A few years later the USA was surprised when the Vietnamese civilians provided assistance to the Viet Cong as they carried out the guerrilla warfare that bogged down the USA in a no-win quagmire. The State Department experts who could have predicted it were all gone.
If you only hear what you want to hear, you're clueless to many truths. Look at the post 9/11 backlash towards those thought that it provided an opportunity for the USA to look at aspects of it's society and foreign policy that stir up hate, and milder forms of disapproval, among other cultures. Those who sought knowledge out of the incident were immediately suspected of being, somehow, part of the enemy efforts.
"Know thyself" often involves looking at the ugly, not just the beautiful. Never underestimate the tendency of both individuals and cultures to come up with some serious bullshit rather than admit that they don't know everything. The meek shall inherit the earth, but the arrogant will make life miserable for them in the meantime.
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For one thing, Kenya's population has increased 10 times since the 1930's, thanks to the outsider's agricultural and transportation advances. Even the crop in question -- maize -- was brought by the Europeans from the Americas. So I'm not so sure that Africa was doing so great, by today's standards, before the outsiders came. The argument that "if we let things get bad enough, the leaders will be forced to do something" is proven incorrect by a look at history. Exactly how bad do things have to get?
The whole planet is on an unsustainable course, and we'll all end up living in a way that takes less out of it. But by sharing information we can have less waste on the one hand, and less hunger on the other.
Look at the alternative: admit that Saint Ronald Regan made a horrible mistake. Can you imagine the devastation that would cause to the religion of about 40% of America? Any amount spent on SDI is worth it to keep from admitting such a thing.
iPhone $400, data within $100,000, privacy breach $1,000,000. Definitely a felony.
I have never seen the difference between "throwing money" and private sector that creates a lot of jobs that do nothing for society: advertising, luxury goods, half of the defense budget, most consumer goods, oversized housing, fashion, trips to Cancun where the the infrastructure is designed to keep the tourist from seeing actual Mexico. It's waste either way, burning fuel with no forward motion. It's resources wasted, poof gone forever, just to keep stirring a nation full of scrambled psychologies that can't settle down long enough to know what love is. (Maybe we should throw money at hysteria management?) Individuals throwing money at things that are wasteful or bad for them isn't freedom, it's addiction. There is a huge call for government policies to enable the addiction to continue. Good luck when sickness meets sickness.
It was email, Linux, and newsgroups that hooked me on the Internet in 1994. I don't think email alone would have done it. Screw "online news, banking services, restaurant reviews, shopping" -- those aren't killer apps to me. I need a forum for interacting with interesting people. The rest I can get to easily enough in town.
From what I've seen, manager boot camp takes 0 days, and you can declare success no matter what happens. Kind of like politics. Oh, wait, exactly like politics.
That means that anyone's free not to sell to you, as long as they don't discriminate based on legally established criteria.
Leonard's been publishing for almost 60 years and both his old stuff and his latest stuff is wonderful. _Djibouti_ (2010) is about Somali pirates (and Americans) and shows detailed research. _Pagan Babies_ (2000) is set in Rwanda and Detroit. _Escape from Five Shadows_(1956) is a pulp western, where Leonard got started.
You've probably watched several movie adaptation of Leonard's work. Here's his stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmore_Leonard#Work
This is a great version of the Communist nightmare.
Small modules that can be assembled in different ways to achieve many objectives -- great idea!
This has been studied. Spending a dollar on war and space research produces the same benefits for civilian life as spending $0.20 for civilian research. And this is just for the research. Funding for actually building and using the death machines invented by the research, and cleaning up afterward to the extent possible (nice prosthesis, soldier!), is pure waste. Space research at least has a huge advantage over war research of not creating such a mess when it's used for its intended purpose, but we'd be a lot better off just funding civilian research instead of the other two.
Amazing ballsy shift from the produce-at-all-cost mentality that typified China during it's early industrial growth. My hat's off to whoever had the vision to make this happen.
It's not just so show that they're part of a group, it's to show that the group means so much to them that they're willing to wear a flag of that identity on their skin for the rest of their life.
"Once a Marine always a Marine" is what the lifetime guys say, and they're the ones getting the tattoos, but the ones who aren't so sure about that aren't gonna get a tat.
We're all Slashdotters here, but only 27 of us value our membership in this group enough to have /. tattooed onto our bodies.
Exactly. Do you realize how much money changes hands because of materialistic belief systems, ego-stroking purchases, and energy-intensive lifestyles, all backed by the inverted philosophy that selfishness is good and that cooperation is evil? I fully support your scepticism regarding the wisdom of such things.
I installed Linux in April 1994, when the current Slackware kernel was 0.99pl14. A friend, Hal, had been encouraging me to use it for months since he knew I liked UNIX and hated Windows. I had a deal to deliver a C++ course and I needed tools to write it, so Hal gave me Slackware on a dozen or so floppies. I installed it on a 386 with 8 megs of RAM. I learned LaTeX and wrote a 200+ page course, viewing the LaTeX output with xdvi and compiling the lab exercises with g++. It worked wonderfully, no problems and no crashes. I remember that emacs took a long time to load, about a minute and 15 seconds, because it did floating point ops for font scaling and the 386 didn't have a FPU. So I would load emacs when I brought up the window manager (OpenLook I think) and then just let it sit there until I needed it. I think that Metafont (part of a LaTeX installation) use FP ops extensively too.
At the time a friend was authoring a C++ textbook on a 486 with 16 megs of RAM, using MS Word on Windows. He had constant crashes and problems because, among other things, it was too much for the machines of the day. But LaTeX easily handled my book, because of it's tight coding and it's data streams in, data streams out model. WYSIWYG word processors just weren't a good idea for large documents at the time. I would then print LaTeX's dvi output files on an HP LaserJet IIP for reproduction at a copy shop. I taught the course for the first time in August 1994 and several times after that. LaTex was a bigger learning curve than Linux by a factor of 5. I've been a Linux user and advocate ever since. I no longer use LaTeX but no one's holding my data hostage -- I can still install LaTeX and make changes to the course 15 years later. The only difference is that on today's machines it runs a lot faster!
including yours. Or maybe they're answering basic questions about the workings of fish which, like all basic research, may or may not pay off in the future. But you can bet that the scientists don't care any more than you do about the human significance of the tunes involved, despite the implications of your trollish post.
The other implication of posts like this is that the scientists are wasting money. Oh. I look at how, say, the DoD uses our money, and how the private sector (including, I daresay, *you*, my dear and cynical OP'er) spends it's money, and realize that money funding research would be madly wasted by the government or its citizens. So I say give it to the scientists. At least they're learning something, and sharing what they discover.
No it doesn't. Don't forget iPhones, Android phones, and many other mobile devices that aren't x86 compatible. To Java's advantage, it's becoming increasingly important that websites work well on mobile devices and future devices and processors yet to be envisioned. Trust me, suppliers to the mobile market would rather use Java than start developing an x86 emulator. As for what application vendors would prefer, I suppose it depends on their legacy codebase. Many companies understood in 1995 why they wanted a portable codebase, and started developing in Java despite it's slow performance at the time, but others didn't see the point and so Google's work is an attempt to bring the Java runtime's advantages to non-Java code.
Over any network, the first part of this -- downloading -- is 99% of the time used. Fortunately the enormous library of standard Java classes is already on the user's machine and doesn't have to be downloaded.
Actually this is trivially easy, at the expense of many connections being established and disconnected. All the programmer has to do is leave the archive argument off of the applet tag, so that the classes are downloaded individually as needed, rather than as part of a jar file.
Maybe what you're getting at is, it would be nice if the programmer could clump classes that are used together into a jar, and have several different jars on the server, and have the applet's JVM load some kind of "table of contents" so that it knew which jar to request when a class was used that wasn't on the local machine yet. Dunno how, or if, Flash solves this problem.
The average line of code in industry is of much lower quality than the average line of code in FC9. Some of the GNU utilities and libraries have been polished up for 20 years, the kernel for 15, X for 20 years, etc. Code that is on its first release is often in production use in industry, but seldom used in any of the big distros -- that's the *other* 100 million lines of code sitting out there in the free software world. So I guess that $10.8B is low by a factor of two or three compared to the money it would cost to develop such a polished product if Microsoft, IBM, Sun, or Oracle were to attempt it.
I'm not sure that extraordinary claims actually *do* require extraordinary proof, just someone willing to make the claim. But in the Vista case, those making the claims apparently do have the proof. It's just that the proof isn't reported in the article about the claim, which is business as usual in the press, which reports the sensational bits and leaves the rest for us to find out on our own.
IBM created a framework to encourage kids to learn programming, but apparently it's so engaging that big kids who really ought to be working spend their time obsessed with it too. You create a bot class, overriding it's methods that respond to events in the game, and then have your bot compete in battle with other bots. As a side effect you learn fundamentals of Java.
Robocode is at http://robocode.sourceforge.net/ While googling I also found http://robocoderepository.com/ which is a Robocode enthusiast site.
I can't believe a person would spend his life on a pursuit like this. He must not care one bit about humanity's problems. "Your actions are screaming so loud I can't hear a word you say."
Too bad. He seems like a bright guy who could have contributed something.
IP and any kind of knowledge are non-rival goods -- I can give them to you and still keep mine.
This and many other important considerations of a steady-state economy are explained here, by Herman Daly:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3941
..."it is a specialized subject that requires serious study and requires that those in the front line of defense be as knowledge as possible.
In a later chapter, Nance gives the Iraq war as an example of a group of leaders that were not as knowledge as possible and ignored the advice of those that were as knowledge[able] as possible."
In the McCarthy-led Red-hunting frenzy of the 1950's, the State Department purged itself of all people who knew what was going on in southeast Asia. Being knowledgeable, the experts said things like "the Vietnamese have a long unfriendly history with China and won't turn into a puppet state, but most of their citizens are being sorely treated by the current regime, and so Communism is very appealing to them." People that made remarks were seen to have Communist sympathies and driven out of government. A few years later the USA was surprised when the Vietnamese civilians provided assistance to the Viet Cong as they carried out the guerrilla warfare that bogged down the USA in a no-win quagmire. The State Department experts who could have predicted it were all gone.
If you only hear what you want to hear, you're clueless to many truths. Look at the post 9/11 backlash towards those thought that it provided an opportunity for the USA to look at aspects of it's society and foreign policy that stir up hate, and milder forms of disapproval, among other cultures. Those who sought knowledge out of the incident were immediately suspected of being, somehow, part of the enemy efforts.
"Know thyself" often involves looking at the ugly, not just the beautiful. Never underestimate the tendency of both individuals and cultures to come up with some serious bullshit rather than admit that they don't know everything. The meek shall inherit the earth, but the arrogant will make life miserable for them in the meantime.